I wanted to drop a quick note and let everyone know I am going to
be speaking at an IOUG event on 9/28/2010 in Downtown Chicago. I
will be targeting DBA’s, Developers, and users who want to know
more about MySQL but do not have the time to devote a ton of time
to learning everything little thing. I will be covering DBA 101
tasks in my 5 minute DBA talk, Developer & DBA common
mistakes, common high availability architectures, and talking
about the various versions, forks, and patches of MySQL that are
floating around in the community.

It was awesome to see everyone at the 2010 mysql UC. Sorry if I
did not get a chance to chat with everyone, time just flew by! I
had great turn out for my two sessions and had a lot of great
conversations with people. If people are looking for my slides
they are posted on the User Conference Website here: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/public/schedule/speaker/75377
.. Thanks Everyone!

I have been asked this numerous times ever since I posted my
InnoDB sample configuration files, Do I have sample configuration
parameters for a MyISAM setup? We are seeing less and less people
use MyISAM, but it is still popular ( especially in prepackaged
form i.e. wordpress). So i figured why not adjust my sample
InnoDB configs and make them suitable for MyISAM.

The biggest limitation to MySIAM is used to be the default key
buffer only can could only be sized up to 4GB ( This was fixed in
5.0.52) . While you can create separate key buffers and assign indexes to
them, it’s not very common ( …

As some people have mentioned here and here Increasing the innodb log file size can
lead to nice increases in performance. This is a trick we often
deploy with clients so their is not anything really new here.
However their is a caveat, please be aware their is a potentially
huge downside to having large log file sizes and that’s crash
recovery time. You trade real-world performance for crash
recovery time. When your expecting your shiny Heartbeat-DRBD
setup to fail-over in under a …

So you need to purchase a new database server, and you really
don’t know where to start..

Because their maybe different recommendations for different OS’s
I am going to stick with Linux with these recommendations. I want
to say right off the bat here… choosing the right hardware should
probably not be a five minute task. I think you really need to
spend time reviewing your application, it’s access patterns, the
io capacity, etc. You just can’t do this in five minutes
generally. But if your under the gun and asked me to spec
something out today… here are some general guidelines.

As of March 10th 2009 here is what I would recommend ( This
are going to change …

A very special 5 minute DBA post here, we are crossing over… sys
admin & dba oh my! I tend to always look first at the OS, and
then move over to looking at what is going on inside the
database. So if you have five minutes to look at the OS, what do
you look for? What tools do you use? What gotchas are their?

First Everyone should be familiar with top. This is a great tool
and place to start.

I was soooo tempted to post a 1 word post on this, just posting
“Innodb”. It would be very easy, and its the advice that I am
going to give in the end anyways. After all we need to get back
to the real reason behind these 5 minute DBA topics. These are
supposed to be a short tidbit of advice to those who are not
going to spend more then 5 minutes making a decision. What’s
easier then a single word. Right? But that would be lazy… so.
Here goes.

Currently there are only 2 main storage engines that you can
consider for your general purpose DB’s. Innodb or MyISAM. While
these two storage engines are included with your MySQL
installation, there are several storage engines that are …

Because I was asked….What should I set my my.cnf parameters to?
What are good default values? How much memory should I allocate
to the db if I have X amount of ram? What is a good starting
point for the mysql config files?

You’re not really Googling for a my.cnf to use are you? You
probably are, Shame on you! The best thing to do is to test
before you make changes, and find the best configuration for your
application. But your not going to are you? oh well I might
as well accommodate you. I make no claims these will work for
everyone. In fact if you hire me later on I may look at you funny
after I analyze your system, and may call you funny names behind
your back for …

I thought I would write a few blog posts on what I am calling the
5 minute DBA. The content of these is interesting or
frequently asked questions that I get when out on a gig, you know
those ones were a developer or a dba runs up and says: “Hey how
do I do this?” I figure, If nothing else maybe it will save me
some time in future.

There are two audiences here. The first is the true 5 minute dba.
Their seems to be a lot of folks out their who end up responsible
for fixing or maintaining a MySQL database who are not really
DBA’s. They maybe developers, sysadmins, or even network guys who
know just a little about databases. These guys and gals
become DBA’s five minutes …

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